1.7.5-Pilferingapples
Les Miserables Brick!Club 1.7.5 1.7.6 Quick Retro-blogging! 1.7.5, Sticks in The Spokes In Which Valjean Can’t Stop Catching a Break No really, it would be hilarious if it weren’t dragging out his misery so much. Not much to add to what more coherent bloggers than me have said about the mixed messages of Providence here, with Valjean being forced to choose again and again to sacrifice himself, except that on a less theological view I think it’s important that he can never say anyone forced him to this. He may resent fate, but there’s no human enemy he can blame for his going to Arras; he’s not under suspicion, no one’s pressuring him to go, so whatever comes of this trip he’s got no one new to hate. Given what that did to him last time— and that his order of rage was the system->humanity->God — this might be something that helps him adjust to life with Cosette later, instead of seething away. Also, can’t help noticing that it’s gossiping rubberneckers who keep making it possible for Valjean to continue. But I thought gossips were Evil! Can it be they’re doing the work of Providence?!? Gasp, shock, other general sounds of sarcastic astonishment at the idea that people talking to each other and taking an interest in each others’ business is not inherently destructive. 1.7.6, Sister Simplice Put To The Test In Which Les Miserables Possibly Passes the Bechdel Test! Actually I think that happened back at the Thenardier’s inn. But it’s so CLOSE here, with the conversation about Cosette! But thinking about how much that test is not passed, in a book this huge, is…yeah, wow. Anyway, anachronistic measurments of a text aside, I like Simplice a lot better in this chapter; she’s way more interesting when she’s DOING something, you know? Her manner’s a lot more convincing when she actually gets to TALK. I like that even now, after a lifetime of being painstakingly honest, she hesitates to say the entire truth out of concern for her patient. Just for a blink, but it’s there! It’s very humanizing, Hugo’s insistence on her genderless waxen marbleosity notwithstanding (also, not the first or last time Hugo gets a bad case of self contradiction with the whole THIS PERSON IS SO PURE AND UNYIELDING AND POSTHUMAN IN THEIR IDEAL PAY NO ATTENTION TO THEM HAVING A TUMBLR’S WORTH OF FEELS HERE, and I honestly have no idea if he meant to be contradicting himself to set up an unreliable narrator image and contribute to his whole death-of-the-author thing, or if he was making a point about how no one ever reaches the ideal (even in furniture, sob) or maybe about how the ideal is necessarily human, or if even he couldn’t figure out if he wanted his characters to be more ideal or more character, or what. I am sure I WILL HAVE SO MANY THOUGHTS ON THIS, THOUGH. Fantine’s sudden rush of vitality is probably supposed to be a False Hope Spot, but even the first time through all I could think of here was how people in endstage hypothermia get to feeling really warm and strip naked if not stopped. She’s burning resources she doesn’t have because her homestasis sensors are too busted to even stop her anymore if she’s excited. Darn it, Madeleine, you couldn’t have gone for her kid a month ago? This is why one shouldn’t procrastinate, one never knows when a moral crisis will demand all one’s attention and then things just get forgotten. Of course Fantine has fooled her doctor into thinking she may survive. But then, her doctor probably thinks she’s sick because of Snow and Perspiration and Humours, so, yeah, not impressed with his raw diagnostic chops. Commentary Gascon-en-exile I’m rather thankful that Hugo doesn’t laden Valjean’s journey down with excessive geographical descriptions, as I find those to be the most tedious elements of some journey narratives. Other than that I’ve not much to say on 1.7.5, though outside the text there’s the thought that even for Hugo’s first audience all the trouble Valjean has to go through would probably seem dated. By mid-century railways made travelling in Europe generally much less of a hassle and therefore practically a non-entity in narrative (unless there’s a scheduled dramatic train wreck or something). I’m not sure if the area around M-sur-M and Arras had much in the way of rail systems by 1862, but it’s still something to think about. 1.7.6 gives us more of the symptoms of that elusive but widespread Mysterious 19th Century Coughing Disease, notorious for killing its victims in accordance with dramatic significance. MNCCD primarily affects women (male deathbed scenes are more often the result of old age or war injuries) and has an especial preference for fallen women, their immune system weakened by the heinous moral depravity that results from spreading one’s legs out of wedlock. Symptoms include coughing blood, fever, chills, eloquently discursive delusions, and recognition of and remorse over past sins leading to (supposedly) profound deathbed moralizing. Despite occasional appearances to the contrary, MNCCD is almost always fatal but has a 100% mortality rate for fallen women, because a narrative in which a fallen woman in not punished and/or redeemed by death is one that risks making moralists uncomfortable. All sufferers of MNCCD are also 100% more at risk for death if they also suffer from a Broken Heart. As a corollary, the children of fallen women are also highly at risk for dramatically convenient death (by MNCCD or some other means), so Cosette’s survival here is truly remarkable. Silliness narrative conventions of the period aside, Simplice lies by omission here, yay! Even though she’s fallen short of living up to her particular moral obsession, Simplice still comes off positively. It’s shocking for some people to hear, but Catholic ideology - here largely based on the work of St. Thomas Aquinas - holds that people are essentially good and, while incapable of ever achieving moral perfection in life, do well to strive toward that perfection nonetheless. Contrast, say, mainstream Protestant ideology, holding that we’re born in a “natural state” of sin (notably the only instance I can think of in contemporary English where “natural” has its pre-Romanticism negative connotation) and will never be anything but evil and fallen without Jesus. No wonder Protestants are lacking when it comes to capacity for confidence and grandeur in religion. Anyway, as you said this may be setting us up for another later image of impossible human perfection, this one flawed not by a white lie but by bullets - and possibly the nasty booze-soaked hand of a horny nonbeliever. Okay, so it would be a bit shallow for Enjolras to reject R during OFPD because of how undoubtedly vile the guy would be after spending a day passed out drunk in a café under bombardment, but I have to say I’d think twice about giving him my hand when it’s presumable that he’d take that as permission to start mounting me in hell. Pilferingapples (reply to Gascon-en-exile) Well, Enjolras has been fighting all day and is doubtless covered in the lovely smell of bodies and gunpowder; I’ve been at enough butchering to know that smell is not especially delightful, itself. And it’s some very good theology discussion, but now I just want to make MNCCD (or as it’s commonly known, Dramatic Death Cough) awareness posters. Ladies! Almost exclusively Ladies! Of the fallen sort! Do YOU have MNCCD? Learn the signs! Amielleon (reply to Gascon-en-exile) So I just wanted to mention that I’ve never read Les Miserables because it’s, as you say, a brick, but I’ve been reading all your commentary and I feel like it’s some gender-theory-attentive version of sparknotes on it, and I could theoretically write a smallish paper on it. Notnearlyadopter (reply to Gascon-en-exile) MNCCD also often seems, rather curiously, to serve to make its victims more beautiful in the days leading to their death— their eyes grow sad and melancholy but shine brightly with fever, they become quite thin, their skin takes on a heavenly pale glow, and the phrase “Too Beautiful For This World” begins to appear in the narration.